hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury
Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!
poet of the month: Tish Davis
30th November
Tish Davis / Tanka
to the stranger's twenties we strangers add ours all the groceries their mom had to pull back moving again
tanka 2020. Red Moon Press <>
my spoon tapping a can for the feral cats; my brother, homeless, in an unnamed woods First Place 2013 World Tanka Competition
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Tish has most gracefully answered all our questions. Thank you so much.
5th Q:
TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? Read both “classic” and “contemporary” tanka and then get into the habit of reading your work aloud. Since tanka are “little songs” consider the use of poetic techniques to enhance the sound: alliteration; assonance; consonance; repetition; etc. Onomatopoeia can also be a great partner when writing minimalistic tanka.
Read the submission guidelines. Don’t let a rejection stop you from learning.
6th Q TTH: Do you show your work in progress to anyone, or is it a solitary art that you keep close to your chest before letting it go for publishing? It’s a solitary art. Most of my tanka prose take years to write. (I do enjoy participating in Tanka Take Home and always appreciate the feedback.)
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Bio: Tish Davis lives in Northern Ohio. Her tanka and related forms have appeared in numerous online and print publications. When she isn’t busy with work and grandchildren she enjoys exploring the local parks with her husband and three dogs.
Challenge for this week:
The best tanka you've ever written - share it with us!
The brevity and often the ambiguity of the tanka (a five-line fixed-form poem) gave rise to many ways of handling words.
Explore.
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And remember – tanka, because of those two extra lines, lends itself most beautifully when revealing a story. And tanka prose is storytelling.
Give these ideas some thought and share your tanka and tanka-prose with us here. Keep your senses open, observe things that happen around you and write. You can post tanka and tanka-prose outside this theme too.
An essay on how to write tanka: Tanka Flights PLEASE NOTE 1. Post only one poem at a time, only one per day. 2. Only 2 tanka and two tanka-prose per poet per prompt. Tanka art of course if you want to. 3. Share your best-polished pieces. 4. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written. Let it simmer for a while. 5. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse. 6. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems. We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished tanka and tanka-prose (within 250 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly magazine.